western digital 200 GB with the 8MB cache


"George Macdonald" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN"
wrote:

I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom built
file server, for a small business...

http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-166
http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-185

I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via
a
separate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free to
suggest).

Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC
ram
support is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dual
channel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? The
difference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundred
dollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste.

Is this a file/print server only?... no database serving? 512MB RAM will
be sufficient - 1GB will give some breathing space for future bloat if you
wish. For hard disks I'd suggest considering a Promise SuperSwap kit
which
will give you failure redundancy plus a near-passive short-term backup by
disk swapping - the hot swapping works well but you have to be ultra
careful about grounding yourself, no matter the weather, before touching
the drive with the key... not sure if swapping goes with RAID-5.

I still have a PII/450 in our W2K file/print server and the only time it
really hurts for memory and CPU speed is on Defrags - yes, it *will* be
upgraded one of those days.:-) If there's a few spare $$ spend on the
case
- I have a Antec SX-1240 (6x5.25" bays) which, AFAIK, has been superseded
now but I don't regret spending on it and it has worked out very well.

What drives are you considering? I recently switched from IBM 75GXPs to
Seagate Barracudas (upgrade from 20GBs to 80GBs) and am seeing no more
little disk related glitches and Active Directory recoveries in the system
logs... and the Seagates, with FDB, are very quiet.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who,
me??